Choosing digital resources for the online EFL classroom

Another quick post before I start teaching in 20 minutes.

Sandy Millin's blog post on The Rock's voice-over inspired me.

Just how the online classroom is supposed to be different to the face-to-face setup in terms of activity formats:

1. the Analog online classroom
   
   At one extreme, we've moved EFL lessons online but are still relying on the traditional way of teaching.
   
   Students have access to coursebooks, the teacher uses shared Word documents of picture files (jpg/png) to hand out role cards and worksheets. The chat box as a whiteboard. Much relies on communicating through our webcam videos.
   
   This has the potential of developing into Dogme in Online ELT.
   
   
2. the Digital online classroom
   
   At the other extreme, we see dazzling (in a positive sense) digital resources. The seemingly infinite amount of free products to enhance our lessons.
   
   On this point, Wordwall seems to have the best integrated features - it combines Kahoot, Quizlet and Google Jamboard. Jamboard is student-centred, interactive, and suitable to group work, whereas Wordwall seems to be a one-way presentation of tasks and materials.
   
   Google Doc is as good as Padlet. Padlet seems to be better suited to group work since there's a single 'pad' (board) for multiple posts.
   
   
3. The Integrated online classroom
   
   Would this be the new 'principled eclecticism'?
   

Teaching - not Testing - Listening

This is going to be a quick post. I've just finished teaching a General English adult lesson online. The lesson's topic was 'I wish' (now) and we used Unit 12A from face2face (Intermediate), 2nd ed. Something interesting came into my mind as I was setting up the lead-in activity. I then decided to change my plan and improvised a bit on the spot, while I was thinking about the flow of activities all the time.

The original plan went like this - the very standard CELTA way:

1. a lead-in where I showed my students a visual of 'Aladdin and the Genie'; they had to tell each other 3 individual wishes (in groups)
2. pre-teach vocabulary: informal phrases on the topic of wishes and desire
   
3. pre-listening task: my students would guess what the 5 pairs of people were talking about from 5 photos
4. listening for 'gist': match 5 conversations to the 5 photos
5. scan listening for specific words: gap-fill (marker sentences)

I first came across the following blog post when I was on my CELTA training: Teaching listening - tweaking the CELTA approach. It has made me question my 'convenient' way of running listening activities in the classroom. I've already explored ways to develop my students' listening skills, including focusing on certain speech features which they struggle with, predicting the type of answers prior to a task, starting and stopping (repeating several times), and listening with the script to connect sound to spelling.

Now, I decided against disrupting the flow of 'wishes and desire' by having a pre-teach vocabulary for the sake of it, the lead-in (#1) naturally leads to the pre-listening task (#3). I then ran the 'gist' listening task (#4), in which my students wouldn't be required to understand the 'blocking vocabulary' in order to complete it successfully. After that, I ran an extended stage of pre-teaching vocabulary (#2): peer teaching, clarification, followed by a practice activity (dialogue Q&A: find something in common). Finally, we returned to the scan listening task (#5); at this point, my students should have understood all the pre-taught phrases in the recording.

The time between the two listening tasks was wide apart. Has any other teacher ever adopted this path/framework when they gave a language lesson with listening?